Page 63 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

“I brought you—I won’t stay.” He opened his hand to show the carved cat he had brought with him and crouched to offer it to Anaya. She eyed him suspiciously but took it. “Chandran asked me to make this for you. I’m sorry I didn’t bring it sooner. It took us some time to return to Banuri.”

“Oh, Chandran,” Medha said softly. “Marut, I’m sorry to ask, but can you tell me what happened? All we heard was that your entire team was lost. The man who came couldn’t tell us anything more.”

Marut’s stomach sank. He had hoped not to have to talk about their terrible flight from White Valley, but Medha deserved to know.

“Please,” she said, and he nodded and let her seat him at the table with a cup of tea.

He told the story in broad strokes, mindful of Anaya’s listening ears, and emphasized Chandran’s role. Medha wept as he described the final parting. He could still see all their faces looking back at him in the pre-dawn light, afraid but determined, the bravest people he could imagine.

Medha wiped her eyes on the hem of her shawl. “Thank you. I imagined so many horrible things. But he saved you and the wizard, and I’ll be content with that. It’s what he chose.”

“He was a good soldier and a good man,” Marut said, wishing as always that he weren’t so useless with words. He only knew how to say what was true, in simple and unadorned terms. Chandran had been the best of men.

He left when the baby—only three weeks old, Medha told him—stirred and fussed in Medha’s arms. He didn’t want to overstay his welcome. Anaya followed him to the door and waved at him with the cat in her hand as he walked off.

He exhaled heavily as he turned the corner at the end of the street and began his climb back up the hill to the palace. There: he had done his duty. If Chandran was watching him from his seat with the ancestors, Marut hoped he would be satisfied.

His route took him by the Temple of the Wind, a hulking complex built in the old style of alternating layers of wood and stone. The central shrine rose from the courtyard, top-heavy carved wood on its narrow base. The lower buildings that formed the perimeter walls housed the temple’s inhabitants; just there, to the left of the gate, was the room where he had slept every night until he joined the scouts.

He hesitated for a moment at the gate, then turned and passed through. He had an offering to make.

This early in the day, the courtyard was empty aside from a novice sweeping the flagstones and a handful of elderly women treading their meditations through the hedgerow garden. Marut climbed the stone steps to the shrine’s door, decorated in hammered plates of silver. The interior was dim and smelled of incense and smoke. The base of the shrine was empty aside from the broad staircase built out from the walls, which turned once and then again as it rose. The upper level held the altar, and facing it were the rows of benches where penitents sat. Morning light filtered through the carved screens covering the windows and cast elaborate patterns on the wood floor, worn smooth by centuries of feet.

Marut dropped a few coins in the offering dish and took a bundle of sacred herbs from the box beside the altar. The fire burned small but steady. He knelt on the cushion and closed his eyes for a moment, picturing Jyoti’s face, before he gave the herbs into the fire. Fragrant smoke rose toward the screened opening in the ceiling above, going to join with the Wind.

He sat on a bench for a while, watching the smoke curl in the air and gradually dissipate. He had nowhere else to be. He had spoken with the cantonment’s superintendent the day before and the man seemed somewhat bewildered about what to do with him. He would need to be assigned to a new team in a new patrol and none were due back in Banuri soon. For now, he was adrift.

He sat in the hazy light, waiting for his heavy heart to ease. His eyes stung in the smoky air. He hadn’t slept well without Sycamore beside him, and now his restless night was catching up to him.

Wind Below, he prayed, clear my mind. Show me a way forward. Bring me gratitude for what I still have to replace regret for what I’ve lost.

He could find no gratitude within him. His friends were dead, his patrol—if anything remained of it—scattered to every corner of the country. He knew no one else in Banuri save Purya and Diya, and he couldn’t bear the thought of subjecting himself to their cozy family life. He would roam the city like a ghost until he was finally given orders to leave it again.

He wished, not for the first time, that Sycamore were less loyal; or that his loyalties were weighted differently, that he cared more for Marut than for Chedi. Marut was a selfish man, noble in no way, and what he wanted, more than anything else in the world, was for Sycamore to have chosen him. For Sycamore to have decided that Marut was worth breaking every bond of honor for.

That wasn’t fair to Sycamore. Marut hadn’t pressed to stay in Twin Rams. He hadn’t been ready, either, to abandon his life in Chedi and his people. He couldn’t say that he was ready now.

He stood and left the shrine. He had found no comfort there, and would find none anywhere else.

Outside the walls of the temple, Banuri was coming awake. He could feel Sycamore’s presence as a vague tugging sensation deep in his gut. He wasn’t far away, but he was as inaccessible to Marut as if he lived on one of the moons. Marut tucked his hands inside the sleeves of his tunic and climbed the steep road that led to the gates of the palace.

CHAPTER23

Marut woke in the night to Sycamore calling for him through the bond. He rose from his bed and dressed as quietly as he could so as not to disturb the man snoring beside him in the barracks room. The cantonment was silent and dark, and the courtyard outside was dark, and the corridors of the palace were lit by lanterns at intervals but were empty and still. Marut followed the tug in his belly up a narrow staircase and down one dimly lit hallway after another, and then he came to a door he recognized and knocked. He could smell Sycamore’s heat even through the door. When there was no answer, he let himself in.

Sycamore was in his bedchamber. In the faint moonlight spilling through the window, Marut could only make out the shape of the bed and the darker shape of Sycamore within it. The air was thick with his scent, and Marut felt arousal cascade through his body as he drew in a deep breath.

The bedding rustled. Sycamore sighed. “Marut?”

“I’m here,” Marut said, and began to unfasten his tunic.

His hands found the edge of the bed and the warm shape of Sycamore’s thighs. Sycamore turned over onto his hands and knees as Marut climbed onto the bed. Marut felt out the arched dip of his back, the round curve of his ass. Slick smeared his inner thighs, and Marut wondered how long he had spent sweating through his heat on his own.

“Sycamore,” he said, his fingers sliding through the crease of Sycamore’s ass and over the hot dip of his hole. “Tell me what you need.”

“Inside me,” Sycamore begged, arching his back even farther. Marut was achingly hard from Sycamore’s scent and the feeling of him beneath his hands. It was so easy to shift into position and push inside as Sycamore cried out, slick and soft and yielding.

He knew Sycamore so well by now, after all their nights together. He knew how to touch Sycamore to make him moan, and knew which noises meant to slow down and which noises meant to speed up. They quickly found a rhythm that had Sycamore pressing his face into the bedding to muffle his groans, and Marut let himself go as hard and fast as he wanted, knowing Sycamore could take it. He would love it. He did love it, from how he tightened around Marut’s cock and came in no time at all, and came again before Marut managed to knot him.